Professor Angela Davis, Apostle for Black Liberation. The Black Panther, March 11, 1972.
“I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I’m changing the things I cannot accept.”
Angela Y. Davis (b. 1944), is a Civil Rights activist, feminist, educator and writer, born in Birmingham, AL. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University and earned her M.A. from University of California, San Diego.
While at Brandeis in September 1963, Davis was shocked to learn of the KKK-perpetrated bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church during Sunday morning services that killed four teenage girls she knew.
Continuing her studies in West Germany, her political philosophy was shaped under her mentor, Herbert Marcuse, a prominent figure at University of Frankfurt. Both returned to the U.S. to promote student activism in anti-war and far-left politics.
In 1967 Davis joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and allied with the Black Panther Party. In 1969 she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA owing to her social activism and leadership in the Communist Party USA.
She soon received international attention after alleged involvement in a kidnapping attempt to liberate three Soledad prisoners from a Marin County courtroom. Davis was accused of planning the incident and supplying the firearms that killed four people, including the presiding judge. Placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list she was driven underground by the ensuing police hunt. Finally arrested in 1970, she and spent 18 months in prison. A huge international “Free Angela Davis” campaign led to her acquittal on June 4, 1972, by an all-white jury.
Davis was named Professor Emerita at University of California Santa Cruz upon retiring in 2008, teaches elsewhere as a visiting professor, and is the founder of Critical Resistance, a group dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex.